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Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library

The 20th anniversary of the Lucy Hargrett Draper Center & Archives for the Study of the Rights of Women in History and the Law will be observed March 5 with a rededication beginning at 1 p.m. in the Gallery Hallway of the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries.

The annual exhibit will examine the changing world of women from 1632 when the first treatise on women’s legal status and rights was published to the 19th and early 20th centuries in the U.S. and Great Britain, a period of major social transformation.

Dr. Toby Graham, university librarian and associate provost, Lucy Hargrett Draper and a student representative will make remarks. Gallery tours and a reception to follow.

The observance will continue with a series of four events co-sponsored with Women’s Studies throughout March.

Billy Weeks, a two-time winner of the Gordon Parks International Photography award, will speak on the influential photographer Tuesday, Feb. 16 at 2:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries. Weeks’ talk will focus on “the moment where the photographer past interacts with the subject present. In other words, what is it that attracts the photographer to make an image?” he said.

The talk complements an exhibit of photographs from a Life magazine 1956 photo essay on segregation in the South that will be on view in the Hargrett Library Gallery in the Russell Building Jan. 25 – March 31. “Gordon Parks Confronts the Color Line” showed life in African-American communities two years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Hargrett exhibit is one of a series of exhibitions installed around Athens under the umbrella “Pictures of Us: Photographs from The Do Good Fund Collection,” which is part of the Global Georgia Initiative of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.

“Gordon Parks once said, ‘The subject matter is so much more important than the photographer,’” Weeks said. “He went on to photograph important issues related to social justice.”

“I saw Park’s work early in my journalism career and it struck a nerve. His storytelling offered so many questions that have challenged me to find answerers in my own work. I believe that Gordon Parks has challenged a generation of photographers to be visual humanitarians,” he said.

Weeks has worked as a journalist for over 30 years. His career started with the Chattanooga Times in 1984 as a staff photographer. In 1995, he became the Photo Team Leader, and in 1999 he was named Director of Photography/Graphics at The Chattanooga Times Free Press. In 2010 he became an independent documentary photographer. As a photojournalist, Weeks has covered assignments that range from the World Series to small villages in Central America. His photographs of poverty in Honduras were selected as an award of Excellence for editorial photography in the Communication Arts Photography Annual. Additionally, he has won the Gordon Parks International Photography award twice and was a finalist seven times. His photographs of baseball in the Dominican Republic and Central America were featured by CNN and Photography District News.

Weeks has served as an adjunct instructor in photojournalism at Southern Adventist University for the last 24 years and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga for three years. He has been a visiting speaker at many universities and a presenter at the Southern Short Course for photojournalism.

Gordon Parks received the National Medal of Arts in 1988 and received more than 50 honorary doctorates. Parks died in 2006.

Parks was the first Africa-American staff member for Life magazine, where he covered the Civil Rights movement for two decades. He also distinguished himself in fashion photography.

As a filmmaker, he was the first African-American to direct a major Hollywood production with the memoir of his youth “The Learning Tree,” filmed on location in Fort Scott, Kansas. Parks also directed the 1970 film, Shaft, the first of what came to be known as “blaxploitation” films.

The University of Georgia Libraries are now accepting nominations for the Lillian Smith Book Award, jointly sponsored with the Southern Regional Council, the DeKalb County Public Library/Georgia Center for the Book and Piedmont College. The deadline is March 16.

Internationally acclaimed as author of the controversial novel, Strange Fruit (1944), Lillian Smith was the most liberal and outspoken of white mid-twentieth century Southern writers on issues of social, and especially racial, injustice. When other Southern liberals such as Ralph McGill, Hodding Carter, Virginius Dabney, and Jonathan Daniels were charting a cautious course on racial change, Smith boldly and persistently called for an end to segregation. For such boldness, she was often scorned by more moderate southerners, threatened by arsonists, and denied the critical attention she deserved as a writer. Yet she continued to write and speak for improved human relations and social justice throughout her life. Smith co-edited a small literary magazine from 1936-45. Publishing and reviewing the literary work and opinions of black and white women and men, the magazine addressed a wide range of political, social, and economic issues and quickly achieved acclaim as a forum for liberal ideas in the region.

Books published in 2015 are eligible for this year’s award, which is given annually at the Decatur Book Festival Labor Day weekend. The award honors those authors who, through their writing, carry on Smith’s legacy of elucidating the condition of racial and social inequity and proposing a vision of justice and human understanding.

The Hargrett Library holds Smith’s personal papers, including personal correspondence, manuscripts, writings by and about her, files on various organizations she was interested in or involved with (many dealing with human rights), audiotapes containing interviews with and readings by Smith, speeches, financial records, photographs, and printed material. Part of the collection contains records relating to her involvement with the Laurel Falls Camp for Girls, which today is operated by Piedmont College as an educational center and artist retreat.

For more information: http://www.libs.uga.edu/hargrett/lilliansmith/index.html

An exhibit in the Hargrett galleries of the Russell Special Collections Libraries honors the contributions of the 2015 inductees into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame: Vereen Bell, Taylor Branch, Paul Hemphill and Janisse Ray.

Vereen Bell A regular contributor to The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s Weekly in their heyday, Cairo native Vereen Bell enjoyed a fruitful career writing short stories often set in his native south Georgia. After appearing serially in the Post, Bell’s 1940 novel Swamp Water was bought by Hollywood and made into a 1941 movie filmed partially on location near Waycross in the Okefenokee Swamp. After the publication of his second novel, Two of a Kind, and a collection of short stories about hunting dogs, Bell’s career was cut tragically short when, as a World War II naval officer, he was fatally wounded during the Battle of Leyte Gulf – the only author to die in battle as a serviceman in WWII.

Taylor Branch Atlanta-born journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch is best known for his epic narrative trilogy of the civil rights era, America in the King Years (1989-2006). He began his career with a series of articles in 1969-70 for Washington Monthly on race and politics in southwest Georgia, and has subsequently worked as both writer and editor at other influential national magazines. He has written or edited several nonfiction works on the nation’s executive branch, including one of the defining books on the Bill Clinton presidency. Investigating the history of the United States’ peculiar mixture of higher education and big-money sports, Branch sparked public debate with his October 2011 cover story for The Atlantic (“The Shame of College Sports”), which led to his being invited to testify before Congress on college athletes and academics.

Paul Hemphill In the late 1960s, the masthead of the bestselling Atlanta Journal bragged that the daily newspaper covered Dixie “like the dew,” and columnist Paul Hemphill was the Journal’s front-page star, writing six 1,000-word columns a week often devoted to the lives and outlooks of wage workers and wayward souls. After winning a prestigious Nieman fellowship to Harvard in 1969, he left daily newspaper work and spent most of the next forty years as a freelancer. Hemphill died in 2009, having written four novels and eight full-length books of nonfiction, collaborated on two others and produced three book-length compilations of articles, all largely about the blue-collar South, its denizens and their ballparks, dirt tracks, two-lane blacktops, and their prejudices. Among Hemphill’s many

awards for writing, in 1993 his acclaimed memoir Leaving Birmingham — part wrenching family memoir and part biography of his native city’s emergence from its violent, racist past — was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Janisse Ray Appling County native Janisse Ray began her career publishing poetry, but it was the runaway success of her 1999 memoir Ecology of a Cracker Childhood that guaranteed her national audience. A naturalist and environmental activist, Ray combines lyrical passion and scientific precision in her writings, exalting and defending the wild areas of America, most particularly her south Georgia homeland—its forests, swamps and rivers. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is Ray’s song to Georgia’s once-glorious pine flatwoods interwined with childhood memories of rural isolation, family tension and poverty. She is the author of a 2010 collection of poetry steeped in her love of wildness, and of four other full-length books of nonfiction that tell the stories of a humble swamp in south Georgia, the Altamaha River, and organic farms such as those Ray has made her own in Appling and Tattnall counties.

The Georgia Writers Hall of Fame is pleased to present this exhibition from the bookshelves and archives of the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The exhibit runs through December 21.

An exhibit of artist’s books and fine press books in the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library galleries at the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries complements the fall book symposium “Appropriation in the Age of Global Shakespeare.”

The symposium is sponsored by the UGA Libraries, the English department, Theatre and Film Studies, and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. It brings to the UGA campus four of the leading scholars of Shakespeare around the world to discuss how TV shows, films, novels, poems, operas, music and stage plays from different countries and cultures adapt Shakespeare and make these 400-year-old plays and poems their own.

The exhibit will be on display through Dec. 23.

The Hargrett’s collection of artist’s books and fine press books are books designed, bound and printed by artists; texts illustrated with print from an individual artist; limited letterpress editions; and books made of and from literary or artistic texts. Several in the UGA Libraries collection are based on Shakespeare’s works and comment on the stories, language and imagery of the text.

Part of the exhibit uses volumes which use both traditional and non-traditional book-forms, and extremes of scale, to reveal new aspects of Shakespeare’s language and imagery. Some book artists respond to Shakespeare by creating books that engage more distantly with the Bard’s work or life. Langston Hughes’s Shakespeare in Harlem is a volume of self-described “light verse,” illustrated with etchings. Hughes’s volume revisits Shakespearean lyrics as African-American call-and-response. It collaborates with Shakespeare in order to deliberately and wittily take on the “low” or parodic elements of pop culture to claim for the Harlem Renaissance the linguistic and cultural authority of the earlier Renaissance.

The symposium is part of the Spotlight on the Arts festival, a 10-day event highlighting UGA units and facilities, from visual arts and creative writing to music, dramatic arts, dance and more to foster an awareness and appreciation of the arts and an environment conducive to artistic innovation.

Exhibitions highlighted include: “Unbeaten, Untied, Undisputed: Georgia’s 1980 National Championship Season,” “Seeing Georgia: Changing Visions of Tourism in the Modern South,” “Set Off for Georgia…,” “Hello Freddy! A Tribute to Tony Award Winner Freddy Wittop,” “Selections from the Pennington Radio Collection,” and the annual exhibition honoring new inductees into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

“Unbeaten, Untied, Undisputed: Georgia’s 1980 National Championship Season” revisits the glory days of the 1980 football season, when “Bulldog Bite” played on everyone’s radio and Buck Belue and future Heisman winner Herschel Walker led the Bulldogs to victory. The display features a selection of materials from the UGA Athletic Association archives, including rarely seen photographs, team uniforms, and team gear created and worn by rowdy fans.

“Seeing Georgia: Changing Visions of Tourism in the Modern South,” explores the state’s transformation from a way station along the route to Florida into a tourist destination all its own. The exhibit highlights six popular sites in Georgia and considers questions of access, preservation, and economics. A replica roadside stand, 1920s gas pump, as well as historic photographs, postcards, and other ephemera set the scene and invite visitors to explore the tourist experience over the course of the 20th century.

“Set Off for Georgia…” celebrates the 250th anniversary of John and William Bartram’s natural history expedition in colonial Georgia. In 1765, the elder Bartram was appointed the “Royal Botanist” by King George III and, with his son William, set out for South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida on a collecting trip that would last two years. The exhibit features original manuscripts, engravings, and maps from the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library as well as specimens from the Georgia Natural History Museum.

“Hello Freddy! A Tribute to Tony Award Winner Freddy Wittop” focuses on career highlights of the costume designer who dressed hordes of Broadway actors, Latin Quarter nightclub dancers and Parisian showgirls. From the red-sequined gown worn during the title number of Hello Dolly! to original designs, playbills, and notebooks filled with sketches and swatches, the display spotlights Wittop’s achievements on Broadway, as well as his time as a dancer.

“Selections from the Pennington Radio Collection” features tube radios, external speakers and other artifacts dating from 1913 to 1933, restored by the late Claude L. Pennington Jr. of Macon. A physician who specialized in microsurgery of the inner ear, Pennington was fascinated by another intricate mechanism: the tube radio.

The annual Georgia Writers Hall of Fame exhibit explores the careers of this year’s inductees: Vereen Bell, Taylor Branch, Paul Hemphill, and Janisse Ray. The display includes photographs and selected works by each author.

RSVP to lnessel@uga.edu or call 706.542.3879. For more information about the Special Collections Libraries call 706.542.7123 or visit www.libs.uga.edu/scl

The concluding events for the “Set Off for Georgia…,” celebration of the 250th anniversary of John and William Bartram’s natural history expedition in Georgia will be held Oct. 10, beginning at 1 p.m. at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia when Joel T. Fry, curator at Bartram’s Garden, the home of John and William Bartram since 1992, gives an armchair exploration of the Bartram’s Garden and reconstructs how John and William’s discoveries from the Southeast were incorporated into this renowned Philadelphia garden. A reception will follow.

At 3 p.m., horticulturalist Linda Chafin will lead a garden tour highlighting plants discovered by the Bartrams now featured in the Garden’s collection. Bartram plants also will be available for purchase during the annual Fall Plant Sale.

At 7 p.m., participants will reconvene at the Russell Special Collections Libraries to hear Andrea Wulf, author of The Brother Gardeners, which won the American Horticultural Society 2010 Book Award. She will talk about the botanical passions, obsessions, friendships and squabbles that knitted together the lives of six men that changed the world of gardening and botany – including John Bartram, the cantankerous Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, and Joseph Banks who joined Captain Cook’s Endeavour on the greatest voyage of discovery of modern times. Friends, rivals, enemies, their correspondence, collaborations, and squabbles make for a riveting human drama set against the backdrop of the emerging British empire and America’s magnificent forests. As botany and horticulture became a science, the garden became the Eden for everyman.

Freddy Wittop, the costume designer “… who dressed hordes of Broadway actors, Latin Quarter nightclub dancers and Parisian showgirls…,” is celebrated in a new exhibit featuring two galleries of his artwork.

“Not one for easy compliments, David Merrick, the producer of ”Hello, Dolly!,” wired Mr. Wittop on opening night, saying, ”Freddy, you are the greatest costume designer in the world,'” according to the New York Times in its obituary.

The red-sequined gown with flamboyant headdress, worn during the title number of Hello Dolly!, welcomes visitors to the Hargrett Gallery of the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries to see Wittop’s original designs, playbills, and notebook with sketches and swatches. The exhibit is up through Dec. 23.

Hello Dolly! swept the Tony Awards in 1964 winning awards in 10 categories, including Freddy Wittop for best costume designer.

“After winning the Tony for ”Hello, Dolly!,” Mr. Wittop was nominated five additional times for best costume design for ”The Roar of the Greasepaint — the Smell of the Crowd,” with Anthony Newley; ”I Do! I Do!,” with Mary Martin and Robert Preston; ”The Happy Time,” with Robert Goulet; ”A Patriot for Me”; and ”Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen,” the New York Times said.

After formally retiring in 1986, Mr. Wittop joined the school of drama at the University of Georgia as an adjunct professor.

The exhibit also features his successful 8-year career as a Spanish dancer, including costumes he designed for the troupe.

In 2001, Wittop died at the age of 89 in Atlantis, Florida. He had just been chosen as the 2001 recipient of the Theatre Development Fund’s Irene Sharaff Award for “lifetime achievement in theatrical costume design.”

Dorinda G. Dallmeyer, president of the Bartram Trail Conference and director of the UGA Environmental Ethics Certificate Program, presents the fourth in the series of lectures, “Set Off for Georgia … Celebrating the 250th anniversary of John and William Bartram’s Natural History Expedition in Colonial Georgia.” Her talk will explore Bartram’s natural curiosity about the world he and his son encountered in colonial Georgia at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 1 in the auditorium of the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries.

John Bartram’s journal of his time in Georgia reveals a man interested in far more than botany. His descriptions run the gamut from weather and mosquitoes to life in the backwoods and in Savannah. Fossils and millstones are as noteworthy as the settlers’ struggle to cultivate silk and herd their free-range cattle. Dallmeyer’s edited anthology “Bartram’s Living Legacy: the Travels and the Nature of the South” was published by Mercer University Press in 2010. The book includes essays by 17 southern nature writers as well as William Bartram’s “Travels” published in 1791.

The lecture will be followed by a reception, book-signing, and gallery tour led by Dorinda Dallmeyer.